Variable Internal Cohesion and Epistemic Community Influence: The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment Report

Abstract

This analysis seeks to test an emerging theory of epistemic community influence. The theory posits that higher internal cohesion amongst members of an epistemic community will garner the community more political influence (Cross 2013). Taking advantage of a large citation database, as well as other open source datasets, this thesis produces a complex, undirected, weighted, multilevel (tripartite), temporal, spatially distributed graph of global scientific collaboration in Arctic research. Using concepts developed in the Social Network Analysis (SNA) literature, this thesis operationalizes cohesion, and seeks to test its effect on one specific case of an epistemic community: the group of researchers who collaborated on the influential Arctic Climate Impact Assessment report (ACIA 2005). The results contests the original hypothesis and opens for a more complex understanding of the effect of internal cohesion on an epistemic communitys political influence.